David Sullivan’s West Ham all at sea after Graham Potter’s morning sacking

West Ham fans are concerned that their board lacks a coherent vision and an adequately modern recruitment structure, but nothing to worry about here. It had found a replacement by lunchtime. All good long-term succession planning hinges entirely on a manager whose sacking seemed incomprehensible a month ago.

Hiring Nuno Espírito Santo makes sense in the way so much of what West Ham do superficially “makes sense”, on a meta, man-in-the-pub level, on gut feel. Bring a defensive-minded manager into a club who have conceded the most goals in this season’s Premier League. To borrow a favourite phrase of Potter’s, go “back to basics”. Nuno took Wolves and Nottingham Forest into Europe, you know, and having worked for Jeff Shi, Daniel Levy and Evangelos Marinakis, has experience with difficult owners.

He joins an entity at odds with itself, unsure what it is trying to achieve or quite why it is trying to achieve it. Their previous highlight of this week was David Sullivan’s partner Ampika Pickston attempting to defend her billionaire porn-baron fiancé’s honour via X.

“He works his ass off and gives a shit about the club,” Pickston wrote. “Spent a fortune on players and managers. There is no exact science to guarantee results.” This is largely true, but that doesn’t mean the only option is alchemy and hope. She then asked a fan account, “Who the fuck are you?” – always a sign that things are going well.

And it is unclear what success for Nuno this season would actually entail. From their current vantage point in 19th, even 14th appears a heady fantasy. In the recent statement, the club said that “regular top-half finishes, strong domestic cup runs and qualification for European competition remain the goals we are working towards”. Does anyone believe this is possible with these players, or believe that anyone involved knows how to change that grim fact?

Perhaps the most damning part of this is that part of the fanbase would prefer Nuno fails and fails quickly, stripping Sullivan and Karren Brady of another possible defence mechanism. As fans have rightly identified, nothing will really change at West Ham until the board does. Why continue along a road to nowhere, constantly applying more frayed and makeshift plasters to a festering wound?

The London Stadium has done everything to protect Sullivan without any real benefit to the fans. As the club pointed out in a statement 11 days ago, ahead of thousands of fans marching in protest ahead of the 2-1 defeat by Crystal Palace, they have the second-highest ground capacity and second-most season-ticket holders (50,000) in the Premier League. A significant proportion of those are expected to boycott the next home game, against Brentford on 20 October, broadcast on Sky, leaving the ground as empty from kick-off as it is by half-time. There is a growing sentiment that relegation might be preferable to perpetual mediocrity and apathy, a tool through which to force the board either materially to change how it operates, or to leave.

And where does Potter go from here? Elite underperformance is a lucrative gig in the Premier League – Potter was reportedly paid £13m after being sacked by Chelsea, and he had 21 months left of a contract worth about £3m annually at West Ham, so he presumably has another £5m to come.

But there is a sense that he has stopped being considered a wholly serious figure, big substitute-teacher energy, so deeply beleaguered that it is eating away at every part of him. Even if he could stomach a return to the Championship, there is no guarantee he would suit it. Ajax and AC Milan considered him pre-West Ham but both went in other directions, and he is a less attractive proposition now. It is easy to hide behind an astonishing incapability for picking the right project, but the results have been insufficient regardless. With a largely similar squad and situation, Julen Lopetegui won 32% of his West Ham matches, Potter 24% – both significantly lower than David Moyes at 45% during the Scot’s second spell in charge in east London. Potter has now lost 18 of his past 33 matches across two clubs, and the only job Lopetegui could find after West Ham was with Qatar.

Potter’s Chelsea side couldn’t score and his West Ham side couldn’t defend. For someone generally miscast as an idealist, a philosophy-backed visionary, he is quietly something of a tinkerman. This is not Ruben Amorim railing against sense and reality – here is a man who tried 100 different things, none of which worked.

Premier League football is in a period of tactical transition, one in which players and coaches alike will either sink or swim. There is little to suggest Potter is still capable of swimming.

Photograph by Alex Broadway/Getty Images